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5.
AOTW: Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite fantasy book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of the fantasy genre?
Nancy Springer: No contest: The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling. Such magic. Such mystery. Such peril. Such sense of place, with the magic growing organically out of the jungle itself. My favorite book outside the genre: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
Patrice Kindl: Ooo. Tough one. Do I really have to pick one? Couldn't I do author(s)? Like, Margaret Mahy and Diana Wynne Jones? I do absolutely love The Once and Future King by T.H. White, which is largely realistic with a touch of fantasy, so maybe it could do for my favorite on both sides of the fence. But then, of course, there's The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll ("For the snark was a Boojum, you see,"). And Jane Austen and Shakespeare and The Eye, The Ear and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. This is not a fair question.
Tamora Pierce: I've never even been able to narrow my favorites down to one author, let alone one book: my preferences and needs change so much that my favorites one week are forgotten for months. My tastes covers Guy Gavriel's Fionavar trilogy, Diana Wynne Jones's A Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Barbara Hambly's The Ladies of Mandrigyn, Bruce Coville's Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and The Monster Ring, Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown and Beauty, Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, Richard Adams's Traveller, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs, Jannell Cannon's Stellaluna and Verdi, Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor --- you really don't want me to go on. I have plenty more. Most generally of all, if I had to name one writer, it would be Mark Twain, whose voice and opinions are as clear and fresh today as they were in his time, except that next week it could be Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, or perhaps Georgette Heyer, maybe Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert A. Heinlein . . .
Carol Hughes: My favorite fantasy book is Elidor by Alan Garner. I find his stories very strange and interesting and the ideas in Elidor always felt very dark even when I read it as a child. To be honest I don't actually read that much fantasy any more. When I'm writing I have to read literature which will help my style, but not influence my voice or the story ideas too much. I'm all in favor of artists and writers 'stealing' ideas but fantasy stories tend to be such strong stuff that it's almost impossible not to blatantly lift ideas and voices. So with that in mind I don't read fantasy when I'm working on a book. In fact last year The Amber Spyglass sat unopened on my bookshelf until I'd finished a draft of the story I was working on. I used reading Pullman's book as a bribe to get me to the end of my own. My favorite book outside of the fantasy genre is Persuasion by Jane Austen.
Nancy Farmer: My favorite fantasy book is Lord of the Rings because it is so beautifully written and original. Outside fantasy I like so many books it would be impossible to list them. Some are Lolita by Nabokov; The Colossus of Marouss by Henry Miller; The Alexandria Quartet by Durrell, books by Narayan and Jhabvala.
Sherwood Smith: Lord of the Rings, which is a different work every time I come back to it. When I first discovered it at fourteen (a friend pointed out 'There's a grownup writing about another world, just like us!') it was an adventure novel, though the poignance of the end was almost devastating. Now I see the horrors of World War One underlying the story in such profound ways that it becomes a palimpsest, a novel of grace and hope written over a deeper indictment of mechanized warfare. My favorite outside of the genre? Oh, it's a tie between Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch.
Mark L. Williams: Again, California Bloodstock and Davy rate high up there, along with (yes) Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, which I'm revisiting with my own 7 year-old. Outside fantasy, wilderness writing has always appealed to me: Yellow Eyes, by Rutherford Montgomery, written from a cougar's perspective, was one of my favorites, growing up.
Meredith Ann Pierce: Absolutely, positively impossible to answer. I cannot pick one. The question's sort of like saying, "Which bite of this sumptuous banquet that you just ate did you like the best?" They were all so delicious, I could never choose!
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